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SACRAMENTAL ANXIETY IN RICHARD II AND THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
Aria Casey
M. A. Seton Hall University, 2018
A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Master of Arts In
The Department of English Seton Hall University May, 2018
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© Aria Casey, May 2018 All Rights Reserved
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Seton Hall University Department of English College of Arts and Sciences
This Thesis, Sacramental Anxiety in Richard II and The Comedy of Errors, by Aria Casey has been approved for submission for the Degree of Master of Arts in English—Literature by:
Approved by:
______Dr. Donovan Sherman, Thesis Advisor
______Dr. Angela Weisl, Second Reader Casey 4
Abstract
Following England’s break from the Catholic Church in 1534, Protestant thought gradually transformed the English Church’s understanding of sacraments. The influence of
Reformation thinkers such as Thomas Cranmer, the author of The Book of Common Prayer, propelled the idea that that a ritual is only as good as the worthiness of a recipient. Ritual, the
“outer” component of a sacrament, now had the potential to be distant from divine favor, the
“inner” component of a sacrament. This potential distance caused anxiety over the authenticity of sacraments, affecting English thought well into Shakespeare’s day. Shakespeare’s plays
Richard II and The Comedy of Errors both struggle with sacramental anxiety in ways that challenge the fruitfulness of sacramental rituals: the anointing of a king, marriage, and baptism.
Sacramental anxiety plagues not only (un-staged) sacred ceremonies of baptism, marriage, and the anointing of a king in these two plays, but even more so plagues the “ceremonies” of words,
“rituals” of behavior, and “forms” of faces: the words, acts, and looks of a person became more greatly suspect, all the more capable of deceiving, of being mismatched to the inner true character.
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Sacramental Anxiety in Richard II and The Comedy of Errors
Following England’s break from the Catholic Church in 1534, Protestant thought gradually transformed the English Church’s understanding of sacraments. Only two of the
Catholic seven sacraments, Baptism and the Eucharist, remained recognized sacraments following the English Reformation. The influence of Reformation thinkers such as Thomas
Cranmer, the author of The Book of Common Prayer, propelled the idea that that a ritual is only as good as the worthiness of a recipient; that the outward sign may not correspond to inward grace (Jeanes 30), undermining any guarantee of grace once understood by the performing of the rituals necessary to sacraments. Sacrament is defined by the 1559 Book of Common Prayer as
“an outward and visible Signe of an Inward and Spirtuall grace given unto us; ordained by Christ himselfe, as a means whereby we receive the same, and a pledge to assure us thereof” (71), but this meeting point between “inner” and “outer” as well as between human and God grew increasingly elusive in Protestant England. Ritual, the “outer” component of a sacrament, now had the potential to be distant from divine favor, the “inner” component of a sacrament. This potential distance caused anxiety over the authenticity of sacraments, affecting English thought well into Shakespeare’s day.
Shakespeare’s plays Richard II and The Comedy of Errors both struggle with sacramental anxiety in ways that challenge the fruitfulness of sacramental rituals: the anointing of a king, marriage, and baptism. Baptism, as the initiation of a person into Christianity, is a moment of definition of that individual; a drowning of the old self and a rebirth into a new life within the new limits of Christ’s body. Marriage, likewise, is a redefining of the self in the body and soul of another. The anointing of a king was never a sacrament for Catholics nor Elizabethan
Protestants, but had a sacramental tradition—that is, a tradition of being sacred but not counted Casey 6 as a sacrament—and after England’s break from Rome and the Pope, the sovereign, as a ruler anointed by God, became increasingly central to English religious thought, through the time of
Queen Elizabeth. In Shakespeare’s plays Richard II and The Comedy of Errors, sacramental anxiety plagues not only (un-staged) sacred ceremonies of baptism, marriage, and the anointing of a king, but even more so the “ceremonies” of words, “rituals” of behavior, and “forms” of faces: the words, acts, and looks of a person became more greatly suspect, all the more capable of deceiving, of being mismatched to the inner true character. In this way, the sacramental anxiety of the “outer” not matching the “inner” cascades down to far below the ceremony proper.
Ernst Kantorowicz says that Richard II is “the tragedy of the King’s Two Bodies” (26).
The political and theological theory that a king has two bodies stems from the Middle Ages, when a distinction was made between the body politic and the body natural of a sovereign. The body politic is the immortal office of the king, it is the “sovereign spirit” who is reincarnated again and again in each successive king. The body natural is the physical, temporal body of a king, the body that can become ill and age, and can die. Each body is possessed by a king at the time of his rule, the body politic bestowed upon his anointment. Since the king is anointed by
God, his office can be immortal as an extension of God’s eternal nature. In the early years of the
English Reformation, beginning in 1534 with Henry VIII’s declaration of authority over the
English Church, the dual notion of kingship not only continued to be an important legal concept, but the increase of the king’s church power meant a heightened emphasis on the immortal
“body” of England’s sovereign.
The movement of these two kingly “bodies” in Richard II from bodies fully possessed by
Richard to the two bodies Richard has lost challenges the integrity of the two-body political fiction while expressing the anxiety surrounding sacraments as introduced by Reformation Casey 7 thinkers like Cranmer. This is because these kingly bodies supposedly make up one indivisible unit (Kantorowicz 9), but Richard loses them separately, one at his deposition and one at his murder. In this way, King Richard becomes an object of sacramental anxiety himself in Richard
II. The scrutiny of the agreement between the “inner” and the “outer”—the form and the spirit, the ritual and the grace—is present in this “tragedy of the kings two bodies,” and also in
Shakespearean plays tonally distant, such as The Comedy of Errors, in which a confusion of identity is intertwined with sacramental images of baptism and marriage. The sacramental anxiety in these plays is the anxiety of the efficaciousness of the outer when the inner cannot be known.
Kantorowicz argues that Richard moves between the roles of the King, the Fool, and God throughout the play (27). These splits in Richard occur as his kingly authority crumbles, with the deposition scene “of sacramental solemnity, since the ecclesiastical ritual of undoing the effects of consecration is no less solemn or of less weight than the ritual which has built up the sacramental dignity” (35). Kantorowicz also discusses a parallel between Bolingbroke-Richard and Pilate-Christ, offering the insight that:
The Son of man, despite his humiliation and the mocking' remained the deus absconditus,
remained the “concealed God” with regard to inner man, just as Shakespeare’s Richard
would trust for a moment’s length in his concealed inner kingship. This inner kingship,
however, dissolved too…Richard realizes that he…has his place among the Pilates and
Judases, because he is no less a traitor than the others, or is even worse than they are….
(38)
Richard’s King-Fool-God roles are each played in desperate attempts to hold onto himself in some way, culminating in a realization that he is a traitor for undoing his sacred anointment. Casey 8
Kantorowicz cites “kingship in name only” as one of the levels of lessening status that Richard experiences several times throughout the play. Kantorowicz careful analysis of Richard’s metamorphosing self-perceptions as they relate to the notion of a king’s two bodies brings forth the insecurity of Richard’s identity as a king despite having been appointed by God. At the same time, this realization that he is a traitor to himself and his proceeding despair are part of what makes Richard a sort of messianic martyr by the end of the play.
The king’s anointing was sacred since the Middle Ages, but after the start of the English
Reformation increasingly gained the esteem of a real sacrament, even filling the void of “real presence” once filled by the Eucharist. Richard C. McCoy in Alterations of State: Sacred
Kingship in the English Reformation continues the examination of sacramental kingship in
Shakespeare with his reading of Hamlet. While Kantorowicz’s book, as suggested by its subtitle,
A Study in Medieval Political Theology, focuses on the medieval roots of this understanding of kingship, McCoy focuses on the political and theological idea of a two-bodied kingship as it developed in Shakespeare’s day. McCoy first explains that “Kings were sacred figures for centuries in Europe” with coronation “seen by some as a sacrament, akin to ordination” and
“rulers from Charlemagne to the Hapsburgs” claiming “imperial autonomy from the papacy, causing tension between kings and clerics” (x). McCoy then brings the discussion beyond this
Medieval backdrop. He writes:
The Reformation intensified this conflict while vastly expanding older notions of sacred
kingship, making them simultaneously more grandiose and more problematic. In
England, Henry VIII’s break with Rome was justified by new theories of royal
supremacy that made the king the head of the church and clergy as well as the spiritual Casey 9
embodiment of the realm. As the reformation advanced, even the sacraments themselves
were diminished and the Mass suppressed (x).
McCoy goes on to examine how the English Reformation caused a transfer of sacramental power rather than a clean break away from the material adoration many Protestants found idolatrous:
“Under the Tudors, the royal presence acquired some of the awesome sanctity of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist and at times even threatened to replace it. Rood screens were dismantled and sometimes replaced with the coat of arms under Edward, and the feast of Corpus
Christi was eventually suppressed and superseded by a cult of Elizabeth and its annual royal processions” (x). The newfound essential “emptiness” of the sacraments led to this increase in the power of the monarchy, McCoy continues: “Monarchy’s enduring power derives in part from a vague but persistent desire for a real presence in the face of an ‘essential absence.’ This ambivalence has its origins in the early modern period, when struggles over Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist launched the Reformation. These struggles divided Protestants from the beginning and were never completely resolved” (xv). The shift away from ceremony and sacrament, then, left a void of “real presence” for many lay persons well into Shakespeare’s day—the struggle over the Eucharist still unresolved. Many English people who once experienced what they believed to be Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist shifted their desire for this type of presence on to the sovereign, who in England not only replaced the Pope, but also the presence once found in the Eucharist.
The real presence of the Eucharist, as well as the real efficaciousness of any sacrament, was threatened by Reformation thought which emphasized the elect status of a recipient. Peter
Marshall in Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation explains that, in the
Middle Ages, Casey 10
Sacraments were symbols and more than symbols. They actually effected what they
signified: the washing away of sins, in the case of baptism. In the technical jargon of the
Church, a sacrament comprised ‘matter’ and ‘form’. The matter was some raw material
or point of departure – water, oil for anointing, bread and wine for the eucharist, sorrow
for sins, mutual consent, and subsequent consummation, in marriage. The form was a
recital of prescribed words. Together they guaranteed God’s life-giving favour to the
recipient; they produced the presence of ‘grace’. (7)
The difference between sacraments in the Reformation and sacraments in the Middle Ages was the belief in the “guarantee” of grace. Thomas Cranmer understood sacrament as a sign, but not more than a sign. As discussed by Gordon Jeanes in “Cranmer and Common Prayer,” sacrament
“signifies or points to what it represents, but must not be confused with it” (30). Accordingly,
“The physical body and blood of Christ, if they are signified by the sacrament of the Eucharist, need not be present—and, for Cranmer, they are not. They are present spiritually, to the elect”
(30). As for the non-elect,
Cranmer adopted a position, which was commonly held in Reformed (as opposed to
Roman Catholic and Lutheran) churches, that an ‘unworthy’ recipient of the sacrament,
in effect one who is not one of God’s elect, receives the outward form of the sacrament,
being washed in baptism or eating and drinking the elements at the Communion service,
but receives no grace as a result. Water, bread, and wine remain empty signs. Only the
elect, redeemed by God’s will and love, receive the grace as well as the sacramental
symbols. Faith, as a gift of God, unites the outward sign and the inward grace, and the
sacrament is then described as truly efficacious (30). Casey 11
The desire to turn an essential emptiness into a real presence is the desire for a “Eucharist miracle,” according to McCoy; because Hamlet wishes to see his father’s “form and cause conjoined” in the closet scene, he “wants his father’s ‘essential absence’ to become a palpable and potent real presence through a kind of transubstantiation of the king’s two bodies” (xvi). The non-elect receives empty symbols in return for his or her practice of the sacraments. These empty symbols have none of the desired effects hoped for by the performing of a sacrament, despite all of the technical requirements being filled. All outward signs of the sacrament, all “matter” and
“form” could point towards its validity, but without the status of God’s elect, a person could not encounter God’s grace in a sacramental way. The assurance one offered by the performing of sacramental rituals was in this way undermined in the early modern period.
Hamlet’s desire to reconcile his father’s “form” and “cause” is, ultimately, a desire for efficaciousness. The question of efficaciousness haunts Richard II in the challenging of the political fiction of a two-body king; a king appointed by God who is still severely burdened by the worldly. Richard Halpern in “The King’s Two Buckets: Kantorowicz, Richard II, and Fiscal
Trauerspiel” moves the double-natured king in Richard II into a genre of fiscal tragedy. Halpern uses Walter Benjamin’s assertion that the tyrant figure of Trauerspiel is “indecisive: buffeted by his creaturely passions, the tyrant finds himself unable to wield his own sovereign power, is upended by the courtly intriguer, and therefore often finds himself in the seemingly antithetical role of martyr.” This, says Halpern, “is the plot structure of Richard II” (72). Halpern continues:
Richard is torn, in effect, between his transcendental claims and his
merely creaturely status—between the upward tug of his theological politics
and the downward, gravitational pull of his natural body…. two forces tend to drag
Richard downward: not only his creaturely being but also the crown itself, which does Casey 12
not belong to Richard as his personal property but has become at least in part the
possession of the realm. The claims of the nobles with respect to Richard’s violation of
the fiscus complement the gravitational pull of the creaturely, binding Richard to the will
of the commonwealth as well as to the natural terrain of the earth. (73)
Halpern’s reading emphasizes Richard’s ties to the worldly over Richard’s role as an anointed king. Not just Richard’s “body natural” but so too his material possessions, his fiscal burdens, weigh him down. In this, Halpern draws on Samuel Weber’s point from that “the failure of the sovereign decision in Trauspiel results not merely from the person shortcomings of the tyrant but from the very structure of a cosmos in which the heavens have withdrawn behind a veil” (72).
Richard’s tragic end is as much a failure of the heavens who anointed him king as it is a fault of his own. This distancing of the heavens results in an abandonment of the characters in the earthly.
Julia Reinhart Lupton in Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology sees a similar impulse in Shakespeare, arguing that:
Shakespeare’s plays…stage the sacramental marriage, civil divorce, and dangerous
liaisons between politics and religion in the West, probing the intersection between the
founding metaphors of divine sovereignty and modern forms of social organization based
on the economic contracts of individuals. Shakespeare’s plays…are preoccupied by the
strange cohabitation of the saint and the citizen…. (12)
For Lupton, “saint” is a “placeholder for a shifting set of linked topics and problems”: “the sacred, the sacrifice,” and “the exception” (12). Lupton shifts focus away from the double-nature of the tyrant-martyr as introduced by Walter Benjamin in The Origin of the German Tragic
Drama (and as examined Halpern’s article) in favor of the double-nature of the citizen. In this, Casey 13
Lupton achieves an emphasis on “the always-emergent future implied by [political theology’s] sacred tropes of fellowship rather than the termination of its mystic past on the public stage of deposition and regicide” (5). For Lupton, Shakespeare marries the saint and the citizen in a way that is just as surprising as the tyrant-martyr figure. Lupton’s readings offer the “other side” of study of political theology in Shakespeare, the side of the citizen-saint, through a study of events such as sacramental marriages and civil divorces in the plays.
Sarah Beckwith considers both the citizen and the sovereign in Shakespeare and the
Grammar of Forgiveness. Beckwith reads Shakespearean drama as an attempt to reconcile the
“inner” and “outer” which were understood to be split in Reformation thought: “The transformation of medieval mass to common prayer, a central part of this revolution, was driven and informed by a sense that the ritual could simply not be efficacious unless its meaning was understood; ritual became a matter for cognition” (28) and “The reformers ardently desired a language in which the ‘outer’ would conform to the ‘inner”….Yet their bifurcated language ended up creating an epistemological quandary that was both cripplingly vexing on a personal level and challenging pastorally. And in a cruel, unintended irony, it had the effect of intensifying a split they themselves wished to cure” (32). Beckwith argues that,
Shakespeare diagnosed and sought to cure false pictures of the inner and the outer which
render us powerless in the face of our own words. For what comes with the picture of an
inaccessible inwardness is an eradication of the inherence of that inner life and
community with others. Shakespeare might be understood to be deeply fearful of our
losing an inner life, in the paradoxical service of that inner life, thus losing our
connection with others and with our own bodies and words. In the works succeeding the
great tragedies he will find his way back to the possibility of restoration and forgiveness Casey 14
through theater, but he will do so only by virtue of understanding the necessities,
evasions, and avoidance in our life with and in words. To achieve this possibility we must
be able to distinguish, or be shown ways in which we do and can distinguish—not finally
once and for all, but habitually and in specific situations—between sincerity and
hypocrisy, between lies and truths, and between theater and theatricality. (33).
In order to reconcile the “inner” and the “outer” so that individuals can connect with others in community, the “inner” must become knowable. This is done through the distinguishing of
“sincerity and hypocrisy,” of the true and the deceiving. If the truth of the inward can be known, then community with others can survive. If a sacrament’s efficaciousness depends on an unknowable inner merit, then that sacrament may not only fail to connect a recipient to God, but to others in the community. If the sacrament of marriage is feared to be inefficacious, then that threatens the connection of the husband and wife, as well as their relationship to each other’s families, their church, future children, and neighbors. If a sacrament is feared to be empty, then it falls short of its communal purpose—it creates anxiety rather than fostering unity with others and
God. Shakespeare, according to Beckwith, attempted to alleviate this anxiety by proving the inner merit knowable through reconciling outer signs with inner truths. The unity of the “outer” and the “inner,” then, is what allows a sacrament to be efficacious.
Richard Finkelstein in “The Comedy of Errors and the Theology of Things” agrees that
Shakespeare offers a reconciliation between the outer and the inner: “The comedy playfully engages the language of grace to forge a connection between spiritual and physical capital.
Rather than worry that tangible gains will subsume spiritual ones, the play imagines redemption through the physical” (326). Finkelstein explains that this united work of the spiritual and physical aligns with Reformation thought: Casey 15
By manipulating economic metaphors for spiritual rewards, Shakespeare invites us to
consider conjointly the changes in theology and consumer economies to which such
Pauline figures point. Propelled by the Reformation and by certain kinds of seventeenth-
century Puritanism, early modern England saw a transition from an iconic culture to an
aniconic one. Although hostile to both images and physical representations (and, of
course, the presence of both in theater), the revolutionary changes brought by aniconic
cultures did not change everything. Even after the Reformation, physical representations
did not exist in binary opposition to meaning but were often seen as providing access to
meaning…. (326)
Although rituals, ceremonies, and icons lost spiritual power in the doctrinal thought of the
English Reformation, these physical signs were nonetheless still points of access for many religious persons. The Eucharist, for example, could no longer offer the physical presence of
Christ, but could still offer a way of remembering the Last Supper and Christ’s suffering.
Finkelstein sees gold as one physical sign of inner feeling in the play:
…Because of Shakespeare’s playfulness with Paul’s language of riches, purchase, and
inheritance, the comedy imagines several times that gold does indeed bring redemption or
deliverance. Syracusean Dromio gives his master ‘the angels that you sent for to deliver
you’ and Adriana sent this money to ‘redeem’ her husband. Unlike Richard II, who in the
eponymous play dreams of having ‘in heavenly pay/A glorious angel’ to help him
triumph (while the pun calls attention to his shortage of money), Adriana has real gold
coins which, were they able to reach the right recipient, could make a difference. The use
of gold can enlighten us about people whose gestures often send messages perhaps
clearer than their words: Adriana’s speed at sending gold to bail out her husband Casey 16
surprises the audience and tells us that she had more love, less rage, and more of a bond
to her husband than her earlier words indicated. The gold provides a physical image and
rhetorical statement of her enduring marital love. (337)
For Finkelstein, the outer is a helpful sign pointing to an authentic inner. This is the ideal relationship between the inner and the outer, one in which the two agree and the outer “face” (in this case, the “face” is “gold”) reveals feelings and intentions which are otherwise inaccessible.
The overwhelming issue in Errors, however, is that the face does not always match the inner— the one who goes by “Antipholus” and looks like Antipholus may not be, on the inside,
Antipholus at all—and, as will be discussed later in this essay, this is the issue the comedy’s ending strives to address, just as the ending of Richard II strives to finally reconcile the outer ceremonies of Richard’s rule with his inner worthiness. Comedy of Errors is in this way the jovial counterpart to Richard II—Richard II addresses sacramental anxiety on a stage of kings, while Comedy of Errors looks at sacramental anxiety in the life of a merchant of Syracuse,
Egeon.
Marriage and baptism are sources of sacramental anxiety in Comedy of Errors, while
Richard II’s anxiety centers on the anointment of the king. As suggested by Kantorowicz and expanded by later critics, the king was a sacred figure, with the anointing of a king being considered a sacrament by many in the Medieval age (the setting of Richard II) and the king gaining some of the sacramental power removed from the Eucharist in the English Reformation.
Indeed, “as a good protestant,” writes McCoy, “Elizabeth saw the host’s elevation, once the sacred high point of the service, as a form of Catholic idolatry and superstition, and she ordered the bishop who would preside at her coronation not to raise it, immediately asserting her royal supremacy” (58), and “for some, the cult of Elizabeth encouraged the same reverence toward the Casey 17 royal presence once according to the real presence” (66) with “the feast of Corpus Christi,” once a festival dedicated to Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, “eventually suppressed and superseded by a cult of Elizabeth and its annual royal processions” (x). Elizabeth, as sovereign, personally asserted her own authority over the authority of the Eucharist. In Shakespeare’s day, then, the
Reformation struggle over Eucharist presence continued still.
This reverence for the king caused tension between monarchs. Elizabeth was succeeded by James, who, “in his most brazen move…claimed Elizabeth’s original gravesite, behind Henry
VII in the middle of Westminster Chapel, for his own. Aligning himself with the patriarch of the
Tudor dynasty, he aimed to establish his central place as the head of a reinvigorated and more fruitful royal line” (77). The importance of “fruitfulness” is necessarily tied up with the English
Reformation. It was Catherine’s lack of sons which, according to Marshall, in part weighed on
Henry’s conscience, with Leviticus 20 threatening infertility for those who marry their brother’s wife. Marshall writes that in Leviticus “Henry saw his own situation laid painfully bare. In marrying Catherine, he blatantly broke the law of God, and had paid for it in a doleful tariff of dead infants” (66). Since Catherine had originally been married to Henry’s late elder brother
Arthur, Henry’s lack of a male heir caused him to question the validity of the Pope’s dispensation that allowed him to marry Catherine after his brother’s death. It was the lack of
“fruitfulness” which, to Henry and some theologians who agreed with his cause, put the efficaciousness of the sacrament of his marriage into question. This question would eventually lead to an English Church which doctrinally suspects the efficaciousness of all and any sacrament, and which offered the monarchs of Shakespeare’s day the spiritual centrality of the once-Eucharistic real presence. Casey 18
With fruitfulness as the yardstick by which Shakespeare’s plays measure an effective sacrament, Richard II and The Comedy of Errors serve as subjects for the study of sacramental anxiety in Shakespeare drama, since both not only deal overtly with discrepancies between the inner and the outer but also address the anxiety these discrepancies cause in the validity of the sacred. In Richard II the sacred is the king, in The Comedy of Errors the sacred is baptism and marriage. It needs to be noted, however, that neither the anointing of a king nor the marriage of a man and woman were, in the strict terms of the Reformed English Church, sacraments, but neither is either play set in a Reformed England, Richard II is medieval and Errors takes place outside of England. Kingship and marriage, therefore, can still be read in the plays as sacramental if not strictly Anglican “sacraments.”
Richard Outfaced
In his self-deposition scene, Richard spies himself in a looking glass. He marvels at the fact that the sorrow he feels inwardly is not appearing on his outward face. He asks: is my face still the same, though I am very different? There is, to Richard, a disagreement between the outward and the inward:
No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath Sorrow struck
So many blows upon this face off mine
And made no deeper wounds? O, flatt’ring glass,
Like to my followers in prosperity,
Thou dost beguile me. Was this face the face
That every day under his household roof
Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face
That like the sun did make beholders wink? Casey 19
Is this the face which faced so many follies,
That was at last outfaced by Bolingbroke?
A brittle glory shineth in this face—
As brittle as the glory is the face! [Shatters glass]
For there it is, cracked in an hundred shivers.
Mark, silent King, the moral of this sport,
How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face. (4.1.277-291)
Richard wonders how his physical appearance is not worse (“No deep wrinkles yet?” and “No deeper wounds?”). He looks like a handsome king who is still unblemished from sorrow’s strikes. Inwardly, however, he feels marred. Richard aligns this gap of the inward and the outward with the gap he (retrospectively) finds in the loyalty of his followers: “O, flatt’ring glass,/Like to my followers in prosperity,/Thou dost beguile me.” The mirror, like a flatterer,
“beguiles” him. Richard here decides that it is not his face which mismatches his feelings, but rather it is the mirror who is misrepresenting his image. Richard is reflecting on the flatterers who outwardly seemed to be friends to him, but in fact inwardly harbored treacherous feelings and intentions. He marvels at the fact that his face is the face that once had a royal brilliance and a royal court at its command (4.1.281-284), and then attempts to reconcile this with his vulnerability to Bolingbroke: “Is this the face which faced so many follies,/That was at last outfaced by Bolingbroke?” Richard’s meditation turns around the word “face.” Eight times the word is as a noun, two groups of four framing the verbs “faced” and “outfaced” in lines 285 and
286. The line which first uses the word as a verb, “Is this the face which faced so many follies”
(285) acts as a turning point right before the climax of, “That was at last outfaced by
Bolingbroke?” (286). “At last” juxtaposes the final line’s “how soon”: “How soon my sorrow Casey 20 hath destroyed my face” (291). Bolingbroke has “at last” “outfaced” the “face” of Richard, and yet “how soon” has Richard’s face been “destroyed.” Richard is recognizing the end of a long show of “faces”—of facades, of strategic outward representations—a show of faces which
Bolingbroke, Richard sees, has won. Richard is also lamenting how quickly his own “face,” his own outward sign of self in the world, has been shattered by Bolingbroke. By the end of the speech, Richard decides his false identity, the façade, which has been associated with his beautiful face is “brittle” and can be “cracked.” In fact, it has been cracked by Bolingbroke already, and now Richard attempts to match his outward image with his inner feeling; Richard shatters the glass, turning his image into “an hundred shivers.” He ends with a warning for
Bolingbroke: “Mark, silent King, the moral of this sport,/How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face,” a warning which foreshadows the guilt King Henry faces as early as the last scene of
Richard II: “Lords, I protest, my soul is full of woe/That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow” (5.6.45-46).
Richard’s struggle to distinguish, in Beckwith’s words, “between sincerity and hypocrisy” as well as his insistence on distinguishing between his face and his feelings here, at the center of the play, is part of a climatic revelation that Richard’s “two bodies” have not been in agreement. Not only do the “inner” and “outer” images of his followers and of himself fail to match, but his body politic and his body natural seem far from the indivisible unit he would have them be. Gone is Richard’s conviction that “For every man that Bolingbroke hath press'd…God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay/A glorious angel: then, if angels fight,/
Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right” (3.2.58-61). Indeed, if “angels still guard the right,” then why is Richard left unguarded? It is true, as Kantorowicz notes, that Richard is not actually deposed by men but by himself (35), yet this happens after Richard realizes he does Casey 21 not have the power of a king that he believed he had: shortly after Richard claims God is in the clouds mustering armies for him (3.3.87-92) Richard regrets banishing Bolingbroke and says,
“Swell’st thou, proud heart? I’ll give thee scope to beat,/ Since foes have scope to beat both thee and me” (3.3.145-146). Richard has realized no cloud-mustered army will defend him;
Bolingbroke has the opportunity to defeat him. Where are Richard’s angels? If Richard has been anointed as God’s chosen king, then why does God’s protection not come? In terms of
Reformation England’s political theology, Richard’s deposition is the product of the inner not being in agreement with the outer, of the sacramental nature of kingship never being fully realized in Richard because, as determined by Bolingbroke, he was an unworthy recipient. The question of Richard’s worthiness at his coronation is not one that can be directly answered within a play that begins later in his rule. However, there are, in fact, outward signs in Richard II that
Bolingbroke is a worthier recipient of God’s graces as an anointed king of England. It is through these “signs” of Richard’s unworthiness that Bolingbroke “outfaces” Richard.
The Fruitful, The Efficacious in Richard II
In Richard II, the gardeners speak of their well-kept garden as a model for the unkempt
“garden” that is England. In their understanding, Bolingbroke is the skilled gardener, who, like them, clears England's “weeds.” The queen, eavesdropping on and then joining in this conversation, inverts their metaphor by staging the head gardener as Adam—one tempted to
“make a second fall” of man. In the inversion the queen plays God, revealing that she acts as if she possesses a divinity which she does possess, proving that she is one of Richard’s
“unpruned,” “over-proud” fruit trees—one of the signs of Richard’s fruitless kingship.
The queen in Shakespeare’s Richard II significantly differs from the historical Queen
Isabella in age. Shakespeare portrays the queen not in the diplomatic, unconsummated marriage Casey 22 of the underage Isabella, but as a mature woman in a romantic marriage. A crucial aspect in the success of Richard’s dethronement by Bolingbroke is Richard’s lack of an heir. Historically, this is because Richard’s first wife died childless, and his new wife was too young to have children.
In Richard II, the queen’s age is unproblematic, leaving the lack of an heir unexplained and presumably coincidental.
This lack, however, echoes in the fertility images of the gardener’s metaphor. In his instructions to his servants he speaks of “dangling apricots” which are like “unruly children,” and “noisome weed” that “suck the soil’s fertility” (3.4.29-39). Garden, harvest, and flower imagery is inherently fertility imagery, but the gardener also mixes these images of production with an image of death: “Go thou, and like an executioner/Cut off the heads of too-fast-growing sprays” (3.4.33-34). The image is not alarming or even especially dark in the context of gardening, but when the metaphor of the Garden of England is made directly in the following lines, the executioner image adopts a heavier meaning. By describing what a responsible gardener ought to do, the gardener is describing the responsibilities—metaphorically—of a king.
The king is in charge of collecting the fruits of his kingdom, of executing those who threaten the commonwealth, and of rooting away greedy advisors—skills Richard proves to lack.
When the metaphor is used by the first servant in response to these instructions,
Richard’s bad counselors are likened to caterpillars, England’s social bonds are called
“disordered,” and, “her [England’s] fruit trees are unpruned” (3.4.40-45). The importance of the responsibility of limiting fruit trees is expanded a dozen lines further into the scene, but before examining this and its relation to the queen in the Garden of England, it should be noted that, in making this metaphor the gardeners have a third layer of meaning: the garden as the theater, the world, and the mind. Casey 23
Like Hamlet’s “globe,” the first servant gardener implies much when asking, “Why should we in the compass of a pale/Keep law and form and due proportion,/Showing, as in a model, our firm estate” (3.4.40-42). The “compass of a pale,” referring to the garden, and also playing on the word for the gardening tool “pail,” simultaneously is meant as mind, world, and theater. In their minds/garden/play the gardeners rule as a model. Even as a country, England itself serves as a pale; England is a model of order in a wider world of untended wildness— though it is, at this time, not at its best. The theater presents its own form and order to England through both theatrical imitation and the mechanics of script, actors, and audience—scripts are
“pruned,” for example.
The servant’s question is answered by the gardener’s news of Bolingbroke’s rise to power. He stages Bolingbroke as the good gardener who does what Richard most failed to do: he weeds. The Earl of Wiltshire, Bushy, and Greene are all “pulled up, root and all” by Bolingbroke the executioner (3.4.47-53).
The gardener then laments the irresponsibility of Richard, expanding on the particulars of fruit tree gardening:
We at time of year
Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit trees,
Lest being over-proud with sap and blood
With too much riches it confound itself. (3.4.57-60)
Ultimately the gardener is referring back to Richard’s now-dead advisors, but the overwhelming fertility imagery here points also to Richard’s lack of an heir, and to his queen. By limiting the fruit tree’s capacity to hold “sap and blood,” the tree best bears fruit. Unrestricted, the fruit tree could ruin itself with “too much riches.” Casey 24
Then the metaphor is broken by sober dialogue regarding the king’s “depression” down from the throne (3.4.67-71). This forces the queen, now also feeling “pressed” down, to jump in
(3.4.72-73). She immediately addresses the gardener as “old Adam’s likeness” (3.4.74) and this analogy quickly evolves to role play when she asks, “What Eve, what serpent hath suggested thee/To make a second fall of cursed man?” (3.4.75-76). The gardener, who had been using his garden as a good model for England, now finds himself in the role of a sinning Adam. Although the queen is the other person in the garden, and a woman, she scripts Eve as off-stage. The queen questions the gardener the same way God questions Adam after He finds him hiding in the garden: “Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?” (Gen 3:11).
Believing she has witnessed the gardener’s hubris, the queen takes it upon herself to remind him what he is made of: “Dar’st thou, thou little better thing than earth,/Divine his downfall?” (78-79). Recalling an earlier part of Genesis where God makes humans out of clay, the queen, acting as God, humbles the gardener by juxtaposing the word “earth” with “divine.”
How could a gardener predict the fall of an anointed King? God humbles Adam after he eats the forbidden fruit, likewise reminding him of his origin of dust: “Because thou hast obeyed the voice of thy wife, and has eaten of the tree, (whereof I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it) cursed is the earth for thy sake…In the sweat of they face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return to the earth, for out of it wast thou taken, because thou art dust, and to dust shalt thou return” (Gen 3:17-19). But the queen, as God, is divine; she, as royalty, acts as if she has a divine right and is more than a “little better” than the earth.
The gardener does not fulfill his role as Adam any further than being a gardener, however. He does not blame an Eve for his words, but God the Queen curses him all the same: Casey 25
“Gard’ner, for telling me this news of woe,/I would the plants thou graft’st may never grow”
(3.4.100-101). Just as God gives Adam the curse of toil in farming, the queen returns to her play- roles to curse the gardener before exiting. The gardener sympathizes with her dramatic act:
Poor Queen, so that they state might be no worse,
I would my skill were subject to thy curse.
Here did she drop a tear; here in this place
I’ll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace.
Rue e’en for ruth here shortly shall be seen
In the remembrance of a weeping queen. (3.4.102-07).
The gardener’s intense expression of pity not only validates the queen’s powerful sadness, but unintentionally undermines her power as “divine” royalty. He dismisses her curse by not believing it will have any effect. By wishing his skill were under her power, he is asserting that it not. In the realm of his garden, he is God. Though his garden is in England, her position as queen of England (for now) does not override his God-given position. Like her husband’s, the queen’s claim to divinity is ineffectual.
Unlike her husband, the queen is not an anointed monarch, and therefore does not have the sacramental claim to divinity that her husband believes in. The hubris she accuses the gardener of is therefore also her own hubris—the queen is usurping on some of her husband’s sacramental claim to divinity. She constantly “divines” Richard’s, with lines such as “My wretchedness unto a row of pins/They’ll talk of state, for everyone doth so/Against a change; woe is forerun with woe” (3.4.26-28). Her outburst at the gardener for sharing the likelihood of
Richard’s being deposed is most ridiculous because she eavesdropped in order to hear bad news. Casey 26
The gardener dares to say what she fears but will not say: it is not the gardener who is truly guilty of hubris, but the queen.
What the metaphor of the Garden of England suggests is that the queen’s hubris stems from her husband’s mismanagement of even their relationship. While their relationship is loving, it is fruitless—not only in their need for an heir but in their need to temper one another.
Richard’s first wife, Anne of Bohemia, is thought by historians to have softened Richard’s reactive temperament, which then went unchecked after her death (Hutchison 8 and Hallam 39,
69). Shakespeare’s Queen Isabella fails to influence her husband to act with responsibility, and likewise, King Richard fails to keep her pride in check. The queen is one of the “unpruned,”
“over-proud” fruit trees of England which have ruined themselves with “too much riches.” If he had limited the queen’s “riches” (which can be taken quite literally) “himself had borne the crown” (3.4.65). The gardener means the literal crown, but, in the context of Richard and
Isabella’s relationship, restrictions would result in fruit, in the bearing of an heir: Isabella (and
Richard) would “born(e) the crown.”
Instead, the only offspring the queen will have are thanks to the gardener, who will metamorphose her tear drop into a bank of rue. Rue, a flower associated with pity, repentance, regret, and compassion, was among the flower’s given out by Ophelia. In both cases, it is a flower gifted to women in moments of extreme grief, and the word “ruth” recalls the extreme grief in the story of the Book of Ruth. This completely breaks the queen’s act as God/divinity and foreshadows the moment in the play when Richard is finally forced to “prune” his relationship with his queen. When they are forced to separate, the queen pleads to
Northumberland: “Banish us both, and send the King with me” (5.2.82-83). This was the fate of
Adam and Eve, to be expelled from the Garden of Eden together, except Isabella wants to take Casey 27
Richard back home with her to France. When this is rejected, the queen abandons her own prospects of comfort in order to be with her husband: “Then whither he goes, thither let me go”
(5.2.85). She is close to quoting Ruth, who said to her mother-in-law, “Intreat me not to leave thee, nor to departe from thee: for whither thou goest, I wil go: and where thou dwellest, I will dwel: thy people shal be my people, and thy God my God” (Ruth 1:16). It is Richard who responds to her that it is better if they are apart, but he has no actual say in the matter. Richard has overspent his soil and lopped away at the wrong branches. Having let the wrong branches of his marriage and of his country overgrow, Richard, fruitless, is soon to be pruned away by a new gardener—albeit the new gardener, King Henry, orders Richard’s execution unintentionally.
The queen’s tears become her offspring, but Richard’s tears turn him to “nothing.”
Immediately after his self-deposition, Richard says he cannot read the articles because his eyes are full of tears (244). And when Northumberland calls him “My lord” (253), Richard replies:
No lord of thine, thou haught insulting man,
Nor no man’s lord! I have no name, no title—
No, not that name was given me at the font—
But ‘tis usurped. Alack the heavy day,
That I have worn so many winters out
And know not now what name to call myself.
O, that I were a mockery king of snow,
Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke,
To melt myself away in water-drops! (4.1.254-262)
Richard, a snowman, now melts before the sun of Bolingbroke—Richard is crying, and
Bolingbroke is king. Richard, if only in this moment, casts himself as the imposter and Casey 28
Bolingbroke as true sovereign. Shaped by the hands of traitors (including himself) a once cold, stagnant Richard now metamorphoses to water-drops, melting away (crying) into “nothing” (41).
What he has pruned away by his self-deposition is not his body politic—the fruitlessness of his rule proves that that body never really belonged to him and that his sacramental anointment was ineffectual. What Richard prunes away is his outward, earthly status as king. He has recognized his unworthiness to be king in realizing Bolingbroke’s “scope” to defeat him, and gives up his riches, power, and identity as sovereign. This pruning of self, however, causes great confusion in
Richard. It is not until he is fully “lopped off’ that he can get the contentment he searches for when he declares, “Nor I nor any man that but man is/With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased/With being nothing” (5.5.39-41). In other words, his disposition is only a partial pruning of his outward self. Richard’s “overgrowth” needs to be fully pruned before his anointment can become effectual. He needs to lose his “over-proud” court, his “over-proud” crown, his “over- proud” wife, and, at last, his “over-proud” body before he is pruned enough to be worthy of sacramental kingship. This is why he becomes a martyr figure by the end of the play. It is in the final “pruning” of Richard’s outer body, his body natural, that his “outer” and “inner” are finally reconciled, and the play demonstrates this in Richard’s reign bearing “fruit” only after his death.
In death, Richard fully realizes the sacred power he was supposed to gain when he was anointed king. The agreement of the outer and the inner in a sort of martyrdom allows the final efficaciousness of his sacramental identity as an anointed king—even though this agreement occurs after he has deposed himself.
The Sacramental in The Comedy of Errors
Antipholus of Syracuse describes himself as “a drop of water” who has fallen into the ocean to seek “another drop” (1.2.35-37). This fall has caused him to lose himself (1.2.37-40), Casey 29 for a water drop mingled with the ocean is “unseen” and “confounds himself” (1.2.38). By entering the world (the “ocean” of the metaphor) in search of a mother and a brother, Antipholus of Syracuse feels he has lost his individuality. In other words, by leaving Syracuse, he has lost his identity. Yet, once he meets Luciana, Antipholus will become once again willing to be
“drowned” and lose his identity in a greater body of water. This is an allusion to baptism, in which one drowns their old self and is reborn as a new person in Christ. Water-drop imagery alluding to baptism fills The Comedy of Errors from beginning to end. Through the reuniting of the Antipholi, the Dromios, Egeon, and Emilia, Antipholus of Syracuse is able to complete his figurative “baptism” through a final pruning from his twin brother—it takes them coming together to for Antipholus of Syracuse to be finally “birthed” as a distinct individual. Since
Antipholus of Syracuse shares all of his outward signs with his twin brother (a name, a face, an identical servant) but he is inwardly a different person, his life consists of wandering and discontentment; it is fruitless. The figurative baptism that finally takes place at the end of the play serves as a sacramental reconciliation between Antipholus of Syracuse’s “outer” and
“inner” self: he is rebirthed as his own distinct person, with the new possibility of entering into an efficacious, sacramental marriage in which his life may bear fruit.
It is the word “Syracuse” that offers this Antipholus a distinction from his brother in the text of the play. While in a performance the audience could distinguish the twins from a difference in appearance, the text itself relies on location names (“of Syracuse” or “of Ephesus”) to identify each twin. In this way, location is central to identity in the text of The Comedy of
Errors. However, as Shankar Raman discusses in “Marking Time: Memory and Market in The
Comedy of Errors,” even this distinction of location in the twins’ names was, at a time, unclear. In a 1623 version of the play, Dromio of Ephesus is referred to as “E. Dro,” but Casey 30
Antipholus of Syracuse is called “E. Ant.” Although in later prints the distinction between the twins who are of Ephesus and the twins who are of Syracuse is made clearer, the confusing “E.
Ant” points to the tie between location and identity still in this play. Harry Levin tells us this is perhaps from erraticus (qtd. in Raman 189), and, in Raman's words, this “locates 'error' in the difference between the solid citizen and his wandering twin” (189).
The Antipholus twins, their names identical, are therefore designated by location (or lack thereof). In telling his story to the Duke at the beginning of the play, their father, Egeon, says of his sons, “And, which was strange, the one so like the other/ As could not be distinguished but by names” (1.1.51-52). The Antipholus twins, apparently, had distinct names originally. Egeon and Emilia used these names to distinguish the two, and obviously these distinct names were not location-based since the twins had so far only lived together in Epidamnum. In the tumult of the storm, they were separated and one mistaken for the other. Egeon's confessed inability to tell his sons apart perhaps also explains the inconsistency in lines 78 and 124 of the same scene. Egeon tells the Duke:
My wife, more careful for the latter-born,
Had fastened him unto a small spare mast,
Such as seafaring men provide for storms.
To him one of the other twins was bound,
Whilst I had been like heedful of the other. (1.1.78-81).
Egeon fills his account with shipwreck imagery, such as the “small spare mast,” revealing both
Egeon’s skill as a storyteller and the trauma of the occasion which impressed such images on his memory. But if Egeon remembers the scene in the same detail with which he recounts it, the Casey 31 images of his twins seem to confuse him even in retrospect. Here telling the Duke that his wife had the “latter-born,” Egeon goes on to say that he has raised the younger twin:
My youngest boy, and yet my eldest care,
At eighteen years became inquisitive
After his brother, and importuned me
That his attendant—so his case was like,
Reft of his brother but retained his name—
Might bear him company in quest of him;
Whom whilst I labored of a love to see,
I hazard the loss of whom I loved. (1.1.124-131)
Egeon mentions that Dromio of Syracuse too was “reft of his brother,” but in Dromio’s case,
“retained his name.” Note that when Egeon says that only names could distinguish his twin sons, he has not yet mentioned the birth of the Dromios, which comes in the following line (1.1.53-
54). Therefore “but retained his name” can be reconciled with Egeon’s earlier assertion that names distinguished his sons by reading the “but” as marking an exception not only to the
“reaving” of one brother from the other—that is, they are not separate in name—but as an exception to the “likeness” of the twins’ cases: the Dromios always shared a name; the Antipholi did not. Presumably Egeon does not realize that in fact the cases are “like” in that while each twin was robbed of his brother, in fact both retained their brother’s name. Egeon, unable to keep the twins straight even in his story, must have given his Antipholus the name of the original
Antipholus. This is supported by Antipholus of Syracuse’s once-name of “E.Ant.” As the misnamed twin, “E.Ant” is the twin whose name is “error.” Alternatively, Egeon may have intentionally given Antipholus an identical name, as is argued by Weinberg: “Egeon implies but Casey 32 avoids specifically articulating that he also re-Christened his biological son after his elder twin,
Antipholus. Egeon’s trauma leads him to seek a revival of his twins, if not in body, then in name” (212). Either way, “Antipholus” conjures the Ephesian’s identity more than the
Syracusan’s.
The problem of name-sharing, whether intentional or a product of mistake, comes to a head in Errors when both Antipholi and both Dromios are all in Ephesus. Antipholus of
Syracuse, already “reft” of his identity upon leaving his home location, has now unintentionally usurped his brother’s identity because the two already share a name. While the Antipholi are interchangeable enough for the citizens of Ephesus, it is clear to the audience who is the established Antipholus and who is an ironic imposter.
The most revealing instance of “Antipholus” of Syracuse's struggle with identity is before he is mistaken for his brother in Ephesus. This instance is Antipholus of Syracuse’s already mentioned self-description as a water drop. Having wandered so much, he has lost his home, and therefore “himself.” The extent of his time away is evidenced by Egeon's travelling to find him, as well as by the contrast of his twin brother's life. Of this contrast, Raman remarks: "Whereas the Syracusan Antipholus confronts the fludity and uncertainty of personal identity, his Ephesian twin insists on the fixity of his own self, reflected back to him by his possessions and his social standing" (188). (Adding to this remark, the same is true, to a smaller extent, of the Dromios;
Dromio of Ephesus has a wife, Dromio of Syracuse does not.) What “Antipholus” of Syracuse must gain in order to find himself, then, is a home. He already had a home with his father in
Syracuse, however, and although he says he went out to seek his brother and his mother, his brother and mother did not feel they had to lose themselves in order to find him or Egeon. What motivated Antipholus of Syracuse, according to both himself and Egeon (1.2.38 and 1.1.125) Casey 33 was inquisitiveness. That is, he wanted knowledge. He says this desire for knowledge makes him
“unhappy” (1.2.33-40), that it prevents him from being content: “He that commends me to mine own content/Commends me to the thing I cannot get” (1.2.33-40). In order to be content, he must find his brother, mother, and self with a home.
Before “getting” his own contentment, Antipholus of Syracuse gets his brother’s.
Addressed by his brother’s wife Adriana, Antipholus of Syracuse decides to play along with
Adriana’s misunderstanding: “What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?/Until I know this sure uncertainty,/I’ll entertain the offered fallacy” (2.2.185-187). Antipholus here is doing what he told the First Merchant he would: “I will go lose myself/And wander up and down to view the city” (1.3.30-31) with “wandering” being a method to “lose” himself, and also holding the second meaning “to error” from erraticus or errant. He has wandered into his brother’s contentment—that is, the home which defines his brother.
This “home” while including a physical structure, a social circle, and economical stability, is encountered by Antipholus of Syracuse chiefly through his brother’s wife. While
Antipholus of Syracuse’s encounters his brother’s servant, goldsmith, and courtesan, it is
Adriana and Luciana who spend the most time with the wrong Antipholus, and it is they who are the Ephesians who help lead Syracuse to his baptism rebirth as a stable, fruitful individual.
Adriana’s first speech to Antipholus of Syracuse is one of her own identity crisis: “I am not Adriana, nor thy wife” (2.2.113). Although Adriana does not actually believe she has lost her identity like the way Antipholus of Syracuse believes he has lost his, she makes a long argument explaining how her identity is mingled with her husband’s:
How comes it now, my husband, oh how comes it,
That thou art then estranged from thyself? Casey 34
Thy “self” I call it, being strange to me
That, undividable, incorporate,
Am better than thy dear self’s better part.
Ah, do not tear away thyself from me;
For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall
A drop of water in the breaking gulf
And take unmingled thence that drop again
Without addition or diminishing,
As take from me thyself and not me too. (2.2.120-130).
Here, Adriana has unwittingly transformed Antipholus of Syracuse’s water drop metaphor into a metaphor about marriage. Like Antipholus, she evokes the image of a drop of water falling into a large body of water. In both metaphors, the drop is so “mingled” with the larger body of water that it is indistinguishable as a separate identity. For Antipholus, this was the image of losing himself in the world; for Adriana, this is the image of a husband marrying his wife. Since the husband is the water drop which once fallen into the larger body cannot be separate without addition or diminishing, Adriana is posing herself as “the breaking gulf” that, though larger, is yet vulnerable to losing some of itself to a water drop that tries to take itself away again. For the water drop, attempts to define itself individually after falling into the gulf are in vain.
After admitting she sees her husband’s estrangement from her as her own fault, Adriana employs the elm and vine metaphor to express marriage:
Come, I will fasten on this sleeve of thine:
Thou art an elm, my husband; I, a vine,
Whose weakness married to thy stronger state Casey 35
Makes me with thy strength to communicate.
If aught possess thee from me, it is dross,
Usurping ivy, brier, or idle moss,
Who, all for want of pruning, with intrusion
Infect thy sap and live on thy confusion. (2.2.168-181)
Adriana believes that her connection to her husband will allow her to share in his strength. He is the water drop she is mingled with, and the elm she is fastened to. This fastening recalls the fastening of the babies to the ship mast, who, like drops of water, were literally lost in the ocean but survived by their sharing in the strength of the mast. Antipholus of Ephesus is Adriana’s mast, though she herself has being aligned with the larger body of water. She both clings to him for strength and is capable of drowning his identity in a union that is certainly (though not merely) sexual.
The irony of this speech is, of course, that she is clinging to the wrong sleeve. Antipholus of Syracuse is not her elm. And “if aught possess” her husband from her is “dross,” “usurping ivy, brier, or idle moss,” which, “with intrusion,” “infects” her husband’s “sap” and “lives on
[his] confusion,” then Antipholus of Syracuse is in “want of pruning.” (2.2.168-181) Infecting his brother’s sap and living on his confusion by unknowingly taking advantage of Antipholus of
Ephesus’ social standing and home, Antipholus of Syracuse’s “want of pruning” is his need for definition. In pruning, a plant such as ivy, brier, or moss, would be made into a more defined shape and brought into more limited boundaries. Antipholus of Syracuse has already expressed his desire to be “pruned” in his water drop metaphor. He has lost himself in the ocean; he has intruded on the world so much that he has lost his own defined space; he has wandered away from his home. Casey 36
One of Shakespeare’s sources for Adriana’s elm and vine metaphor is Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, the story of Vertumnus wooing Pomona. Ponoma is a diligent gardener who forbids suitors to visit her. In order to seduce her, Vertumnus visits her in disguise and persuades her to favor him while pretending to be a third party. He claims that an elm and a vine are an example of the value of marriage—neither the elm nor the vine would be as valuable without the other. The story includes Ponoma’s dedication to careful pruning as one of her virtues as a gardener (14:623-697).
Although Adriana echoes both Antipholus of Syracuse’s desire for union though it means loss (in losing himself to find his brother and mother) and his desire for self-definition (in pruning away his intrusion, for he does not want to be an undistinguishable drop nor the wrong
Antipholus) she is unable to offer Antipholus any pruning. Instead she unwittingly encourages his “idle” “usurping” intrusion—as does her sister, Luciana, though Antipholus will not play along for her.
In Luciana’s own speech to Antipholus of Syracuse, she begins by continuing Adriana’s nature imagery with, “And may it be that you have quite forgot/A husband’s office? Shall,
Antipholus, /Even in the spring of love, thy love-springs rot?” (3.2.1-3). She begs Antipholus to pretend that he is in love with Adriana, completely unaware that this Antipholus is pretending as best he can: “Though others have the arm, show us the sleeve./We in your motion turn, and you may move us” (3.2.23-24). Once again being asked for his sleeve, Antipholus of Syracuse hears also that, for Luciana, the husband is the center of movement in a household—she compares him to being the sphere which other celestial bodies circle. However, Antipholus sees Luciana as a guiding force, later addressing her as “fair sun” (3.2.56). The name “Luciana” itself means Casey 37
“Light,” derived from the Latin lux (Campbell). Dromio of Ephesus’ wife is likewise named
“Luce,” which also means “light” (Campbell). These wives are beacons of home.
Antipholus of Syracuse, who lost himself in the world because of his inquisitiveness, now calls on Luciana to be his teacher:
Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak.
Lay open to my earthly gross conceit,
Smothered in errors, feeble, shallow, weak,
The folded meaning of your words’ deceit.
Against my soul’s pure truth why labor you
To make it wander in an unknown field?
Are you a god? Would you create me new?
Transform me then, and to your power I’ll yield. (3.2.33-40).
Antipholus confesses that he is “smothered in errors” (including his name) and believes that
Luciana’s confusing words hold a hidden meaning that can transform him. In Luciana’s figuring as “light” as well as a god, she takes on an Apollo-like persona in Antipholus’ mind. He takes her misunderstanding as her “laboring” to make him wander, as if his wandering is now understood as a means of teaching; his errors will be turned into lessons. In this way, Luciana is the gardener who will “prune” Antipholus. He promises to “yield” to her, and yet requests what exactly he will be taught:
Oh, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note
To drown me in thy sister’s flood of tears.
Sing, siren, for thyself, and I will dote.
Spread o’er the silver waves thy golden hairs, Casey 38
And as a bed I’ll tale thee, and there lie,
And in that glorious supposition think:
He gains by death that hath such means to die.
Let love, being light, be drowned if she sink. (3.2.45-51)
Turning away from the Apollo image and instead posing Luciana as a seductive siren, Antipholus returns to Egeon’s storm imagery and both his and Adriana’s water drop metaphors. At first it seems he is asking her not to drown him, but the last two lines indicate that he is not against drowning, only against drowning in “thy sister’s flood of tears.” To drown for
Luciana would be “to gain,” in a sense similar to how Adriana uses her mingled water metaphor to explain sexual union. To lose himself to Luciana is to gain value like the elm and the vine, as well as to gain sexual pleasure. Luciana, as light, is also love (“let love, being light”), and if
Luciana sinks, then, Antipholus says, let love be “drowned” because he only wants to love her.
When, at the end of the play, Egeon’s family is reunited, Antipholus makes a point to tell
Luciana that his marriage proposal still stands (5.1.376-78). Emilia says she feels as if she has been in labor all along: “Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail/Of you, my sons, and till this present hour/My heavy burden ne’er delivered” (5.1.402-404). And the name “Antipholus” is suspected to be derived partly from the name “Pholus” which means “of the cave” (Campbell).
(“Anti-pholus” being the true name of Antipholus of Ephesus, the misnamed “Antipholus” is perhaps the “pholus” who “anti-pholus” opposes.) Reading “the cave” as the womb, Antipholus of Syracuse is finally delivered, brought out of the cave and into the light— the guiding “light” of Luciana. Luciana also serves as the “breaking gulf” he will drown himself in. She is the teacher who can quench his thirst for knowledge and their marriage would, moreover, be a reuniting bond between he and Antipholus of Ephesus. As Finkelstein writes, Casey 39
Physical and spiritual selves unite when the Antipholus brothers finally appear
together…with the two male bodies present, we miraculously see a transparency between
physical sign and the spiritual essence it represents. This is the true miracle of Ephesus:
after four acts in which physical tokens almost deliver people, we are seemingly told that
a physical body actually does. (338)
Glyn Austen in “Ephesus Restored: Sacramentalism and Redemption in the Comedy of Errors,” likewise connects the ending with baptism, writing, “The confusions of the main plot are largely concerned with the very real dichotomy between what is, and what seems to be—the variance between appearance and reality” (63) and that “the audience/reader is brought through a process of emotional disorder and tension to release and well-being, so that the play may reasonably be said to have a ‘sacramental’ significance; it is a means by which those who participate in it find a sense of grace and recreation. The denouement of the play is repeatedly found to lay stress on a reference to some sacramental form” (54). Austen explains this sacramental form is baptism:
The gossips’ feast is a baptismal feast, a celebration of the primary Christian sacrament
of regeneration and resurrection….The baptism allusion recalls the water of the sea
journey in Act I scene I, and here, at the play’s end, it serves to stress the purgative and
redemptive nature of events. Baptism, a sacramental act, stands at the absolute climax of
Errors as a symbol of the grace which has been bestowed. (68)
Finally delivered from the “ocean” of his mother’s womb, Antipholus of Syracuse is no longer intruding on his brother’s home, he no longer lives in the “mingled waters” he and his brother once shared in his mother’s womb. He is delivered from these waters in the play’s final baptismal allusion. This birth and baptism have “pruned” Syracuse of his brother. Now
Ephesus’s marriage is no longer threatened by Syracuse, and Syrcause is able to enter into an Casey 40 efficacious marriage of his own. The outer appearances of the Antpholi and Dromios are no longer mismatched with the inner persons. The presence of Emilia, at once standing for the mother and the church, allows for the twins to come into into distinct persons, at once separating them from each other and uniting them the two parts of themselves. Now that the sacrament of baptism is complete, Antipholus of Syracuse must make a home for himself, and while that means he will no longer be a water drop in the ocean of the world, he will be instead a water drop in the “breaking gulf” of marriage. He has just become a distinct individual, and at once seeks the ritual process of mingling his identity with Luciana’s.
Conclusion
The sacramental nature of an anointed king as well as that of a marriage suggest the importance of the outward matching the inward, as sacraments are outward signs of inward grace. However, Richard and Syracuse overcome the sacramental anxiety of the discrepancy between their outward and inward identities through “pruning.” Neither play, though, stages the final realization of the sacramental: in Errors, Antipholus of Syracuse proposes to Luciana but the marriage will occur at a time after that of the play; in Richard II, the audience only sees the undoing of a sacrament, an undoing that Richard finally concludes has not changed his status as anointed king: “Exton, thy fierce hand/Hath with the King’s blood stained the King’s own land./
Mount, mount, my soul! Thy seat is up high,/Whilst my gross flesh sinks downward here to dies”
(5.5.110-112). What the plays do offer is the anticipation of a full realization of each sacrament, a time when the outward ceremony will completely match the inward grace. This is a time when
Syracuse and Luciana are married, and Henry V admires Richard II for the king he finally was in the days leading up to his death. By not staging sacred rituals like marriages or an anointment, the plays honor the outward signs that make up these ceremonies as signs which can be Casey 41 efficacious. The plays cannot stage a true sacramental unity between inner and outer because they are plays; theater is by its very nature a mismatch of inner and outer. At the same time,
Shakespeare’s Richard II and The Comedy of Errors respond to sacramental anxiety with the promise that the inward is knowable and can be reconciled with the outward, just not on stage.
Like the anointment of King Richard and the baptism of Antipholus of Syracuse, the promise of the play will come to fruition only after the recipient has been pruned to worthiness—only after the play has ended and the audience member emerges transformed, anew.
Casey 42
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